HANNAH WHITALL SMITH Women’s History Review, Vol. 7, No. 2, 1998 Representation and Self-representation: Hannah Whitall Smith as family woman and religious guide [1] KERRI ALLEN University of Adelaide, Australia ABSTRACT This article focuses upon representations of Hannah Whitall Smith (1832-1911) and finds that most accounts of her portray her as a family woman, despite the fact that she was a social and political activist who wrote two best- selling religious guides based upon her own experience. But the author finds that in these works Hannah Whitall Smith represents herself as a domestic woman and denies any theological intent rather seeking to gain a voice by using a strategy of theological naivety. Hannah Whitall Smith (1832-1911) was a mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, a wife, a daughter, a sister and an aunt, a feminist, a Quaker, a preacher, a writer, a social activist, a friend. She was the matriarch of a family many of whose members became famous. One of Hannah’s daughters, Mary Berenson, was a feminist and an art critic whose second husband was Bernard Berenson. Her other daughter, Alys Russell, feminist and social activist, was Bertrand Russell’s first wife. Her son, Logan Pearsall Smith, was a well-known man of letters. Mary’s daughters, Hannah’s granddaughters, Ray Costelloe Strachey, feminist author and social activist, and Karin Costelloe Stephen, one of the first Freudian psychoanalysts and Cambridge lecturer, married into the Bloomsbury Group. Hannah Whitall Smith’s female-centred life included her sister Mary Whitall Thomas and her niece M. Carey Thomas, a feminist educator who became the first Dean and the second President of Bryn Mawr College for women in Philadelphia. Hannah and her husband, Robert Pearsall Smith, whom she married at the age of 19, were Americans who settled permanently in England in 1888 following Mary’s marriage to her first husband, Francis Costelloe. Born into a devout Quaker family in Philadelphia, Hannah’s faith was a continuing theme in her life. Despite a period of rebellion during which she and her husband, Robert Pearsall Smith, preferred the revivalist rhetoric of 227 KERRI ALLEN HANNAH WHITALL SMITH evangelicalism and of Methodist camp meetings, she was a lifelong Quaker. Her great granddaughter Barbara Strachey [8], her granddaughter Ray Her religion reflected the major changes which Quakerism underwent in the Costelloe Strachey [9], and her children Mary Costelloe Berenson [10] and nineteenth century, a time during which many Friends embraced Logan Pearsall Smith [11], all left loving representations of Hannah Whitall evangelicalism and left behind their Quietist [2] past. She became influential Smith. According to Barbara Strachey, her other daughter, Alys Russell, and in Quaker and non-Quaker evangelical circles in England.[3] her other granddaughter, Karin Costelloe Stephen, were equally devoted to Hannah Whitall Smith’s networks also extended beyond religious her.[12] Hannah’s “first pleasure ... was her family” according to Barbara circles to encompass social and political activists, and members of the Strachey.[13] Her attitude to child-rearing has been attributed to her grief intelligentsia. Through her involvement in temperance circles in Britain and over the early deaths of four of her seven children. Out of this experience the USA, she knew both Lady Henry Somerset and Frances Willard, whom Hannah formed the “conviction that all children should be given everything she introduced to each other.[4] During the 1870s and early 1880s, while they wanted”.[14] Mary’s daily letters to her mother reveal a deep bond still in the USA, Hannah had been President of her local branch of the between mother and daughter. At the age of 13, in 1877, Mary began a Women’s Christian Temperance Union and later National Superintendent of letter to Hannah: “My dearest, sweetest, darlingest mother, Oh! how I love the British Women’s Temperance Association. From their home, Friday’s thee. I wish thee could know how much I love thee”.[15] Much later, in Hill in Fernhurst near Haslemere, amid a colony of artists, intellectuals and 1902, Mary wrote: musicians, the Smiths entertained some of the well-known names of the era; I waked up this morning thinking of all sorts of pleasant things – and Tennyson, writer Israel Zangwill, artist William Rothenstein, members of the one of the most rejoicing thoughts was that I have thee ... Thee can’t Fabian Society, Graham Wallas and Sidney Webb, and Beatrice Potter (later imagine what solid comfort lies in the thought, which is always, present Webb), who was to be a lifelong friend of Alys, for example. Rothenstein at the back of my mind, that thee is there.[16] described these gatherings thus: Later generations of descendants were no less enthusiastic about Hannah Old Mrs Smith was a Quaker of strict and narrow principles, rigidly held. Whitall Smith. Ray Strachey, in a tribute to her grandmother, wrote of “how Her children, while respecting her faith, talked freely before her, great a woman she was, and how her strength and her wisdom, her encouraged their friends to do likewise; and as they brought to the vehemence, her wit and her common sense were all blended together” and house anyone they thought interesting, whatever his or her views might how she “was a perfect grandmother”.[17] Ray Strachey’s daughter, Barbara be, there were lively discussions.[5] Strachey, never knew her grandmother personally. But she too was “not Yet despite an extraordinary life, mention of Hannah Whitall Smith tends to exempt from the family weakness for writing about itself”, and authored two occur primarily in other people’s stories. In this article I focus on Hannah books on her family which recalled Hannah Whitall Smith as “a remarkable Whitall Smith, or rather representations of her, by exploring two of the woman”, as “an adoring mother” and “an even more adoring multiple readings possible of Hannah’s character: firstly, the version put grandmother”.[18] forward by some of her close family members; and secondly, the narrative of Although Hannah Whitall Smith’s descendants were not Quakers self which Hannah constructed through her literary activity. It is the themselves, their work can be situated within a broader Quaker tradition representations themselves which are the subject of this article.[6] What is which placed a high value on the writing of celebratory accounts of the lives important is not the ‘real’, or what really happened, but how her life has of family members. This phenomenon may perhaps be traced to the Quaker been constructed and revealed through writings by and about her. I turn belief in their own distinctiveness – non-Quakers were referred to as the first to biographical accounts of her life authored by members of her family, ‘world’s people’. Every human life was sacred, each person carried within most of whom were prolific writers of letters, diaries, journals and of books him or herself the ‘Inner Light’, the search for which was the central and essays. Many of these publications contain reproductions of a number of preoccupation of Quakers. The use of biography can be read as a way of Hannah Whitall Smith’s letters. My main interest is, however, in some of her honouring and attempting to capture for later generations that inner person. own work; she became an extremely successful author of self-help Christian Perhaps, too, in a religion which has always been marginal, biographical and texts in which she used her own life experiences. It is important to be other writings were an important means of self-validation. mindful, as Kali Israel points out in her work on Lady Dilke, of the “multiple What is puzzling is why the representations of Hannah by her family relationships between lives, images, and stories found in the intersections fail to take much account of her life as a feminist, a social activist, and an between self-representations, representations by others, and wider Victorian intellectual whose spiritual writing had a wide-ranging and long-lasting cultural discourse about femininity, work, and knowledge”.[7] influence. Her family members were well aware of her work. Ray Strachey, herself a literary figure and social activist, for instance, writes how she and 228 229 KERRI ALLEN HANNAH WHITALL SMITH her sister Karin knew as children that very “many people slept with her understand its methods or its terms”.[25] Her position was one that took the books under their pillows and altered their lives by her wisdom”. prevailing myth of ideal womanhood for its foundation. Christianity and the Nevertheless, for them Hannah Whitall Smith remained simply their demands of capital created in the USA, between 1820 and 1860, a “cult of indulgent Gram whose “nose turn[ed] up in a smiling way” and whose true womanhood”.[26] Confined to the private sphere and to the roles of “wrinkles [had] a smiling turn at their ends”.[19] Can these family narratives wife, mother, daughter and spinster, public roles for women were severely be read differently? Feminist scholars have pointed out how there is no clear circumscribed. Hannah Whitall Smith was working within a tradition that distinction between biography and autobiography.[20] For instance, Carolyn was largely female as books written by women, for women, and about Steedman’s study of Margaret McMillan shows how McMillan elided these women were “the mainstay of the national publishing industry”.[27] Within genres when purporting to write the life of her sister, Rachel McMillan. The this milieu she and other women writers of this ilk were able to define for representations of Hannah Whitall Smith left by her family members were themselves a literary vocation which allowed them to “re-envision women’s centrally concerned with the private and familial person, with her lives and represent them authoritatively” and, in the process, secure a relationship to the authors, rather than with her as a public figure.